Chap 2 Broun

222 Attitudes of Gall to Gaedhel in Scotland before John of Fordun DAUVIT BROUN It is generally held that the idea of Scotland’s division between Gaelic ‘Highlands’ and Scots or English ‘Lowlands’ can be traced no further back than the mid- to late fourteenth century. One example of the association of the Gaelic language with the highlands from this period is found in Scalacronica (‘Ladder Chronicle’), a chronicle in French by the Northumbrian knight, Sir Thomas Grey. Grey and his father had close associations with Scotland, and so he cannot be treated simply as representing an outsider’s point of view. 1 His Scottish material is likely to have been written sometime between October 1355 and October 1359.2 He described how the Picts had no wives and so acquired them from Ireland, ‘on condition that their offspring would speak Irish, which language remains to this day in the highlands among those who are called Scots’. 3 There is also an example from the ‘Highlands’ themselves. In January 1366 the papacy at Avignon issued a mandate to the bishop of Argyll granting Eoin Caimbeul a dispensation to marry his cousin, Mariota Chaimbeul. It was explained (in words which, it might be expected, 1See especially Alexander Grant, ‘The death of John Comyn: what was going on?’, SHR 86 (2007) 176–224, at 207–9. 2He began to work sometime in or after 1355 while he was a prisoner in Edinburgh Castle, and finished the text sometime after David II’s second marriage in April 1363 (the latest event noted in the work); but he had almost certainly finished this part of the chronicle before departing for France in 1359: see Sir Thomas Gray, Scalacronica, 1272–1363 , ed. Andy King (Surtees Society: Woodbridge 2005), xix–xxi. 3... sure condicioun qe lour issu parlascent Irrays, quel patois demurt a iour de huy, hu haute pays entre lez vns, qest dit Escotoys : ibid ., 22; W. F. Skene, Chronicles of the Picts, Chronicles of the Scots (Edinburgh 1867), 199. By ‘Irish’, of course, Grey means Gaelic. The statement appears in a passage which Grey interpolated into a Scottish king-list-plus-origin-legend; see Dauvit Broun, The Irish Identity of the Kingdom of the Scots in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Woodbridge 1999), 91–5. 50 DAUVIT BROUN would have echoed Eoin’s supplication) that the pool of eligible partners was restricted due, among other things, to ‘the diversity of dialects between the highlands, in which the said Eoin and Mariota dwell, and the lowlands of Scotland’. 4 For an example directly from the ‘Lowlands’ we might naturally turn to the oft-repeated passage in Book II of John of Fordun’s Chronicle of the Scottish People discussed by Martin MacGregor in the previous chapter. 5 There (it will be recalled) the Gaelic-speaking inhabitants of the Highlands and Islands are described uncharitably as ‘a wild and untamed race, primitive and proud, given to plunder and the easy life’, in contrast to ‘Teutonic’ speakers in the Lowlands, who are touchingly portrayed as ‘home-loving, civilised, trustworthy, tolerant and polite’. 6 This account is so vivid and detailed that it is little wonder that so many historians have made it the starting point of their discussion of Scotland’s perceived division into ‘Highlands’ and ‘Lowlands’. Unfortunately its date and authorship can no longer be regarded as straightforward issues. W. F. Skene, whose edition of Fordun’s Chronicle was published in 1871, maintained that most of the work (including Book II) was completed in the mid-1380s. 7 Skene’s reasoning has, however, been challenged by Donald Watt, editor of the new text and translation of Bower’s Scotichronicon (a much expanded version of Fordun’s 4Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers, Relating to Great Britain and Ireland: Papal Letters , vol. iv, A.D. 1362–1404 , prepared by W. H. Bliss and J. A. Twemlow (London 1902), 56. These individuals are identified and the marriage dispensation discussed in Stephen Boardman, The Campbells, 1250–1513 (Edinburgh 2006), 73–4. 5See 7, above. 6Johannis de Fordun Chronica Gentis Scotorum , ed. W. F. Skene and trans. Felix J. H. Skene, 2 vols. (Edinburgh 1871–2) [ Chron. Fordun ] i, 42; ii, 38. The best translation is in Alexander Grant, ‘Aspects of national consciousness in medieval Scotland’, in Nations, Nationalism and Patriotism in the European Past , edd. Claus Bjørn, Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (Copenhagen 1994), 68–95, at 76–7, where he discusses problems posed by the terms gens , nacio and populus . 7Chron. Fordun i, xxx–xxxiii. He regarded his MS D (Dublin, Trinity College MS 498), which consists only of Book V and Gesta Annalia to 1363, as the earliest stage in Fordun’s work, with books I to IV not completed until 1385. MS D, however, plainly represents an abbreviated text (see Broun, The Irish Identity , 73 n. 55). ATTITUDES OF GALL TO GAEDHIL 51 Chronicle ). Initially Watt pointed to possible indications that Fordun may still have been active as late as 1389 or 1390, but that it might also be suggested that he died as early as 1363. 8 Elsewhere Watt argued firmly for the earlier date. 9 Scholars in the interim have opted for either the mid-1360s or the mid-1380s, or various points in- between. This makes it difficult to decide whether the famous passage in Book II of the Chronicle should be set alongside the comments of Thomas Grey and the dispensation granted to Eoin Caimbeul and Mariota Chaimbeul as potentially an early statement of the ‘Highland/Lowland divide’, or whether it should be viewed as belonging to nearly a generation later. Should Fordun be regarded as a self-conscious innovator, or as simply an elaborator of what had become a familiar way of imagining Scotland? The problem of dating the passage is even more pressing if we follow Professor Barrow’s remark that ‘the reign of Robert II [1371–90] seems extraordinarily early for the emergence of so clear-cut a dichotomy between highland and lowland Scotland’. 10 The dating of Fordun’s work is complicated by the fact that the text (or, rather, texts) attributed to him have pointed to different conclusions. The Chronicle itself (consisting of five books) goes no further than 1153 and ends with a genealogy of David I obtained (we are told) from Walter Wardlaw, bishop of Glasgow, who is referred to as a cardinal. This would point firmly to a date sometime between 8Scotichronicon by Walter Bower in Latin and English, gen. ed. D. E. R. Watt, vol. iii, edd. and trans. John and Winifred MacQueen, and D. E. R. Watt (Edinburgh 1995), xvi–xvii. 9D. E. R. Watt, ‘Fordun, John ( d. in or after 1363)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , edd. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford 2004) [ODNB ] xx, 355–7. Note also the passing reference to the 1360s as the date of Fordun’s work, in Scotichronicon by Walter Bower in Latin and English, vol. ix, ed. D. E. R. Watt (Edinburgh 1998), xi. This earlier dating was anticipated (but not discussed) in Grant, ‘Aspects of national consciousness in medieval Scotland’, 76. 10 G. W. S. Barrow, Scotland and its Neighbours in the Middle Ages (London 1992), 105 (in a paper originally published as ‘The lost Gàidhealtachd of medieval Scotland’, in Gaelic and Scotland: Alba agus a’ Ghàidhlig , ed. William Gillies (Edinburgh 1989), 67–88). 52 DAUVIT BROUN 23 December 1383 and 23 August 1387.11 In some of the manuscripts, however, other texts have been appended, including material known to scholarship as Gesta Annalia , which runs from St Margaret’s English royal ancestors as far as 1363. In some cases this has been continued fairly chaotically to 1385 (probably by a later scribe). Donald Watt regarded Gesta Annalia as a separate work by Fordun which originally stopped in the middle of 1363 because he died that year or soon afterwards. 12 This, of course, requires that the reference to Cardinal Wardlaw (and other indications of a date during Robert II’s reign, 1371–90 13 ) be seen as later additions.14 All these assumptions about the genesis of Fordun’s Chronicle and its relationship with Gesta Annalia have now been challenged, and the extent of Fordun’s own contribution has been called into question. The disposition of Gesta Annalia in the manuscripts, and its relationship to other chronicles, has been used to show that it consisted originally of a text ending in 1285. 15 (For convenience this first part of Gesta Annalia has been dubbed ‘ Gesta Annalia I’, and the later addition of material covering the years 1285–1363 ‘ Gesta Annalia II’.) Gesta Annalia I, in turn, has been shown to be the only surviving part of an earlier version of Fordun’s Chronicle (dubbed ‘Proto-Fordun’) which was probably completed in 1285. 16 ‘Proto- Fordun’ itself appears to have been an expanded version of an even earlier work attributable to Richard Vairement, a Frenchman who 11 Dauvit Broun, Scottish Independence and the Idea of Britain from the Picts to Alexander III (Edinburgh 2007), 262. 12 Watt, ‘Fordun, John’, ODNB xx, 355–7. 13 For example, the Stewart castle of Rothesay is described as ‘royal’: Chron. Fordun i, 43. I am grateful to Steve Boardman for discussing this issue with me. 14 The evidence for a date as late as 1389 or even 1390 is restricted to one branch of the stemma, and should therefore be regarded as additions by a copyist/redactor: see Dauvit Broun, ‘A new look at Gesta Annalia attributed to John of Fordun’, in Church, Chronicle and Learning in Medieval and Early Renaissance Scotland , ed.

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